ASIAN POP How Hello Kitty Came to Rule the World / With little advertising and no TV spinoff, Sanrio's 30-year-old feline turned cute into the ultimate brand

by Edward Gomez, special to SF Gate

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ASIAN POP How Hello Kitty Came to Rule the World / With little advertising and no TV spinoff, Sanrio's 30-year-old feline turned cute into the ultimate brand

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Faster, pussycat -- sell, sell!

So goes the unspoken mantra for Hello Kitty, one of global pop culture's most successful, most ubiquitous and, after three decades, most durable brands. For Japan's Sanrio Company Ltd., the worldwide purveyor of everything Hello Kitty, its steady outpouring of cute-cat merchandise constitutes more than a product line; with more than 20,000 items available at any given time, of which roughly 10,000 are aimed at the North American/South American market, Hello Kitty amounts to a vast consumer-goods universe, accounting for the largest chunk of Sanrio's nearly $1 billion annual sales around the globe.

Sanrio has other, lesser stars in its cute-character lineup, including the droopy-eyed penguin Badtz Maru and the baseball-playing frog Keroppi. None of them, though, has as big a fan base or as much earning power as Sanrio founder and President Shintaro Tsuji's signature creation -- a white-faced, round-headed cat with a little bow on one ear, a strangely emotionless expression and, perhaps most strikingly, no mouth. No other creature whose image appears on the key chains, handkerchiefs, coin purses, stationery and other items the Japanese call "fancy goods" has Hello Kitty's allure.

That's because no other member of the Japanese company's money-making characters has what Hello Kitty has managed to attract and keep drawing back for more, year after year -- legions of girls eager to spend their pocket money generously on products that are seen as fun, affordable and unabashedly cute. They're girls as young as 6 who, at the very start of their shopping careers, begin spending on little trinkets -- pencil cases, notebooks, hair clips -- for themselves and their friends. They're older girls in spirit, too, including women in their 30s who may purchase Hello Kitty lamps, sheets and clocks to outfit their daughters' bedrooms, or Hello Kitty microwave ovens, T-shirts, tote bags and party supplies for their own use and amusement. (For some, it's a girlish guilty pleasure.)

In their book, the authors explain that Tsuji, who grew up during the hardship years of World War II, became an engineer with an instinctive, entrepreneurial flair. Among the first products Tsuji brought to market: silks, "oriental sandals" and, under license from Hallmark in the United States, greeting cards. Those early ventures taught the young businessman about the ups and downs of trend-fueled sales. By the late 1960s, he had secured the licensing rights for Japan for goods emblazoned with the Snoopy character from Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" series. Tsuji also turned his attention to developing character-driven products of his own.

"Hello Kitty came out in 1974 when Japan's kawaii culture was first emerging," Belson said by phone from New York, referring to Japan's now well-known, popular passion for cuteness in general -- in pop stars, animal images, advertising -- and in cutely designed, cute-looking character goods in particular. "She is the original, and it is hard to replace her. She became the icon of cute for a whole generation. You can't buy that kind of lucky coincidence."

Hello Kitty "quickly struck a chord" with Japanese consumers, Belson and Bremner write in their book. When the brand came along, the Japanese had rebuilt their country and had bounced back from the destruction of the war. Japan's hard-working population was poised to enjoy the fruits of an "economic miracle," a run of prosperous boom years that would peak in the 1980s.

Tsuji may have regarded his creation as a form of "social communication" rooted in Japan's long-standing gift-giving traditions (Hello Kitty items have always been priced so that children can buy them as presents for friends and family members), but it offered escapism, too.

By the 1970s, Belson and Bremner write, long, daily, "mind-numbing [train] commutes" were taking "the fun out of work" for millions of Japanese. Increasingly, "women became servants to their salarymen husbands who brought home the bacon but rarely saw their kids. Stuck in new, remote bedroom communities [outside big cities], women wanted comfort, and Hello Kitty, with her soft features and homespun story, was just the kind of nurturing creature to help them escape the hostile, industrialized urban world."

Keeping Kitty Mysterious

Plainly, Belson says, Hello Kitty -- and the buying, sharing and personal enjoyment of the brand -- can also be seen as a form of entertainment. Surprisingly, though, unlike Snoopy, Mickey Mouse, Tweety or other American cartoon characters that have also caught on in Japan, neither Hello Kitty nor any of her Sanrio peers -- over the years, there have been more than 400 of them -- has been routinely supported by films, TV series, comic books or other major-media offerings.

In fact, Sanrio has tended to keep the personality profiles of its characters relatively vague -- the better to allow consumers to imbue them with their own emotional values and energy.

Intentionally or not, Hello Kitty appears asexual and seems to have no obvious ethnicity. She does have an official bio, but this backstory seems almost too modest -- or irrelevant -- given the magnitude of the character's international success. It doesn't seem to have played much of a part in it, that is. According to Sanrio's Web site, the enigmatic cat "lives in London, England, with her parents and her twin sister, Mimmy. They have lots of friends at school, with whom they share many adventures. Her hobbies include traveling, music, reading, eating yummy cookies ... and, best of all, making new friends. As Hello Kitty always says, 'You can never have too many friends.'"

Or too many customers, although just what the unsinkable meowster's millions of consumers do with the products they purchase or how they think about them are aspects of the Hello Kitty experience Sanrio cannot control. Take, for example, the wearing of Hello Kitty pins, T-shirts and other accessories by disaffected American teens or by irony-soaked punk-rock fans; their appropriation of the brand strips it of its wholesomeness in fashion statements that declare, "Isn't this cute? Not!"

Then there are porn stars like Kiko Wu ("the Net's first real Asian amateur") or Bianca Lee, who have been known to cavort lustfully with Hello Kitty merchandise; in one photo on her Web site, Lee deploys the Hello Kitty vibrator, a cheerful, pink-plastic instrument equipped with a figurine of the famous feline (clutching a little teddy bear) at one end. Sanrio, which cautiously guards Hello Kitty's wholesome image as far as all of its licensed products are concerned, prefers to call the gadget a "personal massager."

Too Cute?

Elsewhere, internationally known Japanese contemporary artists such as Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara have used their work to critique the obsession with all that is kawaii that pervades so much of Japanese culture.

In response, Murakami has devised his own "cute" characters, like Mr. DOB, a balloon-headed creature whose menacing, monstrous teeth belie the playful spirit of his Mickey Mouse-like ears and big eyes. Nara, meanwhile, paints picture-book portraits of little girls, the same youngsters who, in real life, would be regular buyers of Hello Kitty merchandise. But Nara sets his little ones alone in broad, empty pictorial space so that a viewer seems to be looking down at them as they look up with faces more sinister than sweet.

"In Japan, communication is about appearances and surfaces," Murakami said in an interview a few years ago. "We use cuteness and formality to disguise what we really want to say. My work looks at the other side of that cuteness."

Ironically, though, even Murakami and Nara's creations may be seen as kawaii in their own ways. Just as, over time, radical, avant-garde art forms may become assimilated into the mainstream, there's something about the Japanese aesthetic sensibility today that is expansive enough to allow what's anti-cute to be seen as, well, authentically, unironically cute.

"There's a wide range of what's considered kawaii," notes Christine Yano, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus in Honolulu. Yano, who has done extensive research on Japanese pop culture, teaches courses in the field and pays special attention to the Hello Kitty phenomenon. She says that, for Japanese consumers, what's cute "is more relational -- it describes more of a relationship with a person or an object" than it does specific aesthetic values. "So, almost anything can be kawaii if it is embraceable. [For the consumer,] the relationship is one of taking care of something. Thus, even something ugly can be kawaii."

Hello Marketing

Getting cozy with Hello Kitty goods -- everything from stuffed animals to steering-wheel covers, computer USB-port hubs, CD players and underwear (like a Christmas-themed thong decorated with jingle bells) -- allows for both emotional investment and emotional release. Yano says, "In Japan, there is a lot of pressure put on human relationships, ... lots of rules, strictures, responsibilities. An interpersonal relationship ... is not a freewheeling thing." By contrast, she observes, "An object doesn't demand much from you, only as much as you want to give ...." For a society such as Japan's, where, Yano says, "stress is a key word, ... a relationship with a kawaii object is a socially harmless way to go."

Echoing that feel-good vibe, author Ken Belson notes that Sanrio founder Shintaro Tsuji "sees himself as a purveyor of goodness ... through an image." In the United States, Hello Kitty does no advertising. Still, despite competition from other, more heavily promoted cartoon stars, like Disney characters that benefit from timely TV or movie tie-ins, Hello Kitty's enduring -- or unflappable -- combination of wholesomeness, cuteness and charm has made the brand the sales leader among girls' brands in stores where toys are not sold. (In stores with toy sales, Hello Kitty ranks second only to Barbie among girls' brands.)

Pamela Bonnell, Sanrio's creative director for licensing in North America and South America, attributes this success to the fact that "we've made a really conscious decision not to be a media property." (When was the last time you saw a Disney character on a fast-food chain's beverage cup?)

Sanrio doesn't always go it alone, though. In East Asia, the company famously teamed up with McDonald's to offer limited-edition Hello Kitty premiums along with the fast-food chain's Happy Meals. Between 1999 and 2000, customers mobbed McDonald's outlets in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, often buying food and immediately throwing it away, just to get their hands on unique Hello Kitty dolls dressed in native Asian costumes. (Sanrio doesn't discourage consumers from regarding Hello Kitty products as collectibles. It came as no surprise, therefore, when those coveted McDonald's premiums soon turned up on e-Bay.)

In the United States, Bonnell explains, Sanrio works with certain retailers to create products that serve their special marketing-demographic needs. For Target, the hip mass retailer that attracts a more affluent clientele, the company is developing a tiki-themed "pool party" line for next summer. "Overall, we try to keep a sense of humor and we try to keep things tongue in cheek," says Bonnell, who is based in Los Angeles. "So, even if we dress Hello Kitty as a punk rocker, which we [have done], we make sure it's not too hard and that it's always [an] embodiment of the trend, which is still soft, cute and appropriate."

Hello Stereotype?

For all her popularity, though, there are "people out there who have Hello Kitty issues," as Belson and Bremner put it. There is, for example, a sizable camp for whom the cute-versus-kitsch controversy surrounding Hello Kitty is its own mind-bending reward. "Hello Kitty has no mouth but she must scream. That is why her head is so big," one Internet wit opined. "Hello Kitty has no mouth, and yet in space you can hear her scream," offered another.

California-based performance artist Denise Uyehara, whose work has explored what it means to be Asian American and female, includes an original piece called "Hello (Sex) Kitty: Mad Asian Bitch on Wheels" in her repertoire. With that "brutally honest" work, The SF Weekly noted, Uyehara "kiss[es] cuteness good-bye" as she "deconstructs sexual and cultural identity," giving the lie to stereotypical images of Asian women as meek, demure, submissive and, yes, cute -- cute, perhaps, in the Hello Kitty sense of ripe with innocence.

"Uyehara subverts and distorts the image of Hello Kitty to score rhetorical points about feminism and gay culture that it's safe to say would make the character's caretakers at Sanrio cough up fur balls," Belson and Bremner write. In an interview, the performance artist described "Hello (Sex) Kitty" as "a parody response to Hello Kitty and to the cute ideas I grew up with."

The Ultimate Brand

In the United States, Asian American girls and women have long been a core segment of Hello Kitty's market, shopping both at retail outlets in Chinatowns and Japantowns in big cities and at Sanrio's own company-operated stores. More recently, Hispanic American females have discovered and become big consumers of Hello Kitty goods. In the course of her research, Yano asked her contacts at Sanrio, "What's in it for Hispanics?" Their answer, she says, was "family values."

Sanrio, Yano explains, found that Hispanic consumers "like to coddle their children, and buying them Hello Kitty goods with this kind of sweetness in mind is part of Hispanic culture." In this way, she says, as the brand further expands its market across geographic and cultural borders, "it gets a little bit tweaked."

As Sanrio's Pamela Bonnell looks ahead to a 30th-anniversary bash the company will host in Hello Kitty's honor in Los Angeles later this year, she doesn't seem all that surprised about how the brand and its audience continue to grow and evolve. "It's been a slow and steady build for us, and people don't really realize it's as big of a brand as it is," she says, noting that "it still has that weird cult status."

Love her or loathe her, the little cat from Japan with unstoppable global sales appeal is here to stay. "Wherever we go, people dump their purses out and show us what they have, and everybody has something," Bonnell admits. "Once you start looking for Hello Kitty product, it's everywhere."

Violet Blue is author and editor of over a dozen sexual health books and erotica collections. She is a professional sex educator, lecturer, podcaster, video blogger, porn/erotica reviewer and machine artist.

Violet is also a fetish model, a member of Survival Research Labs, an author at Metroblogging San Francisco; girl friday contributor at Fleshbot, a San Francisco native, and a pro blogger.

For more information and links to Web sites discussed in Open Source Sex, go to Violet Blue's Web site, tinynibbles.com.